(Image: Blotto)

With many Capitol Hill restaurants going with the tides and flows of the pandemic growth of app services and streamlined takeout, new Capitol Hill cornershop and pizza joint Blotto is refreshingly cattywompus.

Blotto serves pizza just three days a week — Thursday, Friday, and Saturday — starting at 5 PM until the sourdough runs out. You can’t order online. You might be able to call an order in. But, really, you should stop by the corner of 12th and Denny. That’s really the point.

“It’s really thrilling to have people in the space after working on it so long,” Cal Hoffmann said.

CHS stopped by Blotto’s new 12th Ave home this week to talk with Hoffman and Jordan Koplowitz as the pizza shop and market is still settling into its first days of business. The Blotto trio — Hoffman, Koplowitz, and Christy Wyble — have been in the shop for every hour of its existence, soaking in the transition to a brick and mortar restaurant after launching the business as a takeout-only pop-up.

The pizza partners say moving from the Blotto pop-up world of customers who grab a pizza and disappear and transitioning to the 12th Ave universe of seeing customers enjoy their creations, plus meeting neighbors and regulars, has been invigorating.

“We’ve met so many people from the neighborhood,” one says, the other adding with a laugh that there seems to be “an impossible number of people who come by who say they live next-door.”

CHS reported here in February on the plans for Blotto to take over the former Chungee’s after a decade on 12th for the Chinese restaurant and bar. Blotto was born in 2019 as the pizza pop-up project put wholesale Greek bakery Paximadi’s Broadway commercial space to work refining recipes for 14-inch pizzas with crusts that are thin and crispy with rims of puffy, chewy dough.

COVID-19 restrictions and pricing issues around construction material scarcities created challenges for the overhaul and buildout but the restaurant rounded into shape with new floors, a paint job, and an improved kitchen plus room for the mercantile portion of the business just in time for the city’s emergence from pandemic restrictions.

“We’re opening up right at the time as things are opening back up,” Koplowitz said. “We feel fortunate that we’re opening up at the same time as the city.”

12th Ave shoppers will find a highly curated mix of retail goods, market snacks, beer, and wine, all with a focus on small, mostly local producers. There are lots of things you can’t yet find anywhere else in the city including tortillas from Seattle’s Milpa Masa, local Yoka Miso, and sauce from Woon Kitchen out of Los Angeles.

The pizza, meanwhile, hasn’t changed but the pizza guys Hoffman and Koplowitz seem bent on never resting as they perfect their sourdough crusts and special pies. Blotto offers four pies at a time — a cheese, a marinara, and two seasonal specials they plan to change about every two weeks as ingredients become available and whims need servicing. The current specials are a red pie with fennel sausage, kale, greens, pickled green garlic, fontina and mozzarella, and a lemon cream pie with mozzarella and Cloud Cap mushrooms, pickled leeks, chili oil, and fresh oregano.

(Image: Blotto)

It’s also a new world for Blotto’s customers from the Broadway pop-up days. Like Blotto, they’ll be transitioning from a world of online ordering and streamlined pick-ups to a more zig-zaggy place where you’ll be interacting with humans again, possibly waiting for a table, and facing the lingering uncertainty of a busy kitchen serving a limited, craft product. How will it go?

Hoffman, Koplowitz, and Wyble aren’t exactly sure but it should be an exciting adventure.

“Every day that we’re open, we learn so much more.”

Blotto Wine, Beer, and Grocery is now open at 1830 12th Ave. Wednesdays through Sundays starting at 3 PM. Pizza is served on Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays starting at 5 PM “until we run out.” Wednesday and Sunday are market-only hours. Blotto currently stays open until 9 PM for store and drinking needs.

You can learn more at blottoseattle.com.

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